Film School 101: Recent Episodes
Film School 101
A love story in the city of dreams . . . Blonde Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia (Laura Harring). Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project. David Lynch’s seductive and scary vision of Los Angeles’s dream factory is one of the true masterpieces of the new millennium, a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge like no other.
In Darren Aronofsky's darkly psychological thriller, a committed dancer (Natalie Portman) struggles to maintain her sanity after winning the lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake".
A popular though critically ignored Western at the time of its release, John Ford's The Searchers was canonized a decade later by auteur critics as the American masterpiece par excellence exerting its influence as a cinematic touchstone and "cult film" among such directors of the New Hollywood as Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Representing Ford's most emotionally complex and generically sophisticated work, The Searchers manages to be both a rousing adventure movie and a melancholy film poem exploring the American values at the heart of the Western genre.
At the center of the film is Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a bitter, ruthless and frustrated crusader engaged in a five-year quest to retrieve a niece kidnapped by the Comanches. Edwards is perhaps Wayne's most accomplished characterization, isolated by the violent individualism which defines his heroic status.
One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This three-hour ride from Akira Kurosawa—featuring legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura—seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action, into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope.
Stanley Kubrick took science fiction cinema in a grandly intelligent new direction with in this enigmatic adaptation of a short story by revered sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. When Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and other astronauts are sent on a mysterious mission, their ship's computer system, HAL, begins to display increasingly strange behavior, leading to a tense showdown between man and machine that results in a mind-bending trek through space and time. 2001: A Space Odyssey stands alone in its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery.
In a time of conflict and rebellion, a group of unlikely heroes led by Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire's ultimate weapon of destruction. Directed by Gareth Edwards, Rogue One draws deep on Star Wars mythology while breaking new narrative and aesthetic ground for the franchise.
During the height of the Vietnam War, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) journeys upriver on a perilous and increasingly surreal odyssey to assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-promising officer now operating with godlike impunity in the jungles of Cambodia. Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, hallucinatory epic is cinema at its most audacious and visionary.
The conclusion to Peter Jackson's epic trilogy based on the timeless J.R.R. Tolkien classic and the culmination of nearly 10 years' work, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King presents the final confrontation for control of Middle-earth. Hobbits Frodo and Sam reach Mordor in their quest to destroy the 'one ring', while Aragorn leads the forces of good against Sauron's evil army at the stone city of Minas Tirith.
A former San Francisco police detective (James Stewart) wrestles with his personal demons while becoming obsessed with the hauntingly beautiful woman (Kim Novak) he has been hired to trail. Alfred Hitchcock’s surrealist thriller delivers delirious, slow-burn modernism that, almost half a century later, led it to unseat Citizen Kane as the Greatest Film of All Time in Sight and Sound's authoritative 2012 poll.
In the most dazzling debut feature in cinema history, twenty-five-year-old writer-producer-director-star Orson Welles synthesized the possibilities of sound-era filmmaking into what could be called the first truly modern movie. In telling the story of the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of a William Randolph Hearst–like newspaper magnate named Charles Foster Kane, Welles not only created the definitive portrait of American megalomania, he also unleashed a torrent of stylistic innovations—from the jigsaw-puzzle narrative structure to the stunning deep-focus camera work of Gregg Toland—that have ensured that Citizen Kane remains fresh and galvanizing for every new generation of moviegoers to encounter it.
Three decades after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. In this visually staggering sequel, director Denis Villeneuve reinterrogates the themes of humanity and artificial life introduced in the 1982 sci-fi classic. Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic, and romantic.
Star Wars is one of the most popular, profitable, and entertaining movies of all time. It advanced special-effects technology to a degree unseen before, with computerized and digitally-timed effects. The film helped resurrect the financial viability of the science fiction genre, a category of films that was considered frivolous and unprofitable. This mythological tale of space-age heroism follows an idealistic young boy, Luke Skywalker, who becomes trained in the righteous ways of the Force in order to rescue the captured Princess Leia from the Death Star and the dark forces of the Empire, led by Darth Vader.
Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is an epic masterpiece of sweeping scope and grandeur that remains one of the most breathtaking and exhilarating animated films of all time. A thousand years after the Seven Days of Fire destroyed civilization, warring human factions survive in a world devastated by atmospheric poisons and swarming with gigantic insects. The peaceful Valley of the Wind is nestled on the edge of the Toxic Forest and led by the courageous Princess Nausicaä, whose love of all living things leads her into terrible danger as she fights to restore balance between humans and nature.
Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter who washes up in dead-end Albuquerque, happens upon the scoop of a lifetime, and will do anything to keep getting the lurid headlines. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred exposé of the American media’s appetite for sensation that has gotten only more relevant with time.
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La Haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La Haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.
Julianne Moore gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental allergies. A profoundly unsettling work from the great American director Todd Haynes, Safe functions on multiple levels: as a prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and as a horror film about what you cannot see. This revelatory drama was named the best film of the 1990s in a Village Voice poll of more than fifty critics.
Roman Polanski’s brilliant noir stars Jack Nicholson as a private eye navigating the murky moral climate of sunbaked, 1930s Los Angeles. Hired by a beautiful socialite (Faye Dunaway) to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, he is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together in an unforgettable finale.
This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock is set at the turn of the twentieth century and concerns a small group of students from an all-female college who vanish, along with a chaperone, while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing. Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.
In his breakthrough second feature, Bong Joon Ho explodes the conventions of the policier with thrillingly subversive, genre-defying results. Based on the true story of a string of serial killings that rocked a rural community in the 1980s, Memories of Murder stars New Korean Cinema icon Song Kang Ho as the local officer who reluctantly joins forces with a seasoned Seoul detective (Kim Sang Kyung) to investigate the crimes—leading each man on a wrenching, yearslong odyssey of failure and frustration that will drive him to the existential edge. Combining a gripping procedural with a vivid social portrait of the everyday absurdity of life under military rule, Bong fashions a haunting journey into ever-deepening darkness that begins as a black-comic satire and ends as a soul-shattering encounter with the abyss.